1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for music playback. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for coordinated and synchronized music playback in local spatial proximity with wireless ad hoc networks.
2. Description of Related Art
Traditional portable musical entertainment, best exemplified by Walkman and portable CD players, is usually confined to individual listeners. In general, for a group of music listeners to share mutual music listening, the only way is to play music loudly to the open space. However, it might cause nuisances to other persons, who have no intention for listening, while the music is playing loudly. Therefore it is advantageous for music sharers to confine mutual music sharing to only persons who intend to listen.
With leaping advances in wireless networking and digital music technologies such as Bluetooth and MP3, portable musical entertainment can be shared and appreciated simultaneously by more than one person without playing music out loudly. Furthermore, music sharers can decide to appreciate mutual musical entertainment simultaneously with only the chosen sharers.
Prior art relating to music carrying radio lacks the mechanisms and methods to achieve the aforementioned objective. For example, Bottum (U.S. Pat. No. 6,014,569), uses cellular communication systems to deliver asynchronous audio to subscribers. There is no mechanism to ensure synchronous audio reception and playback among the logged-on subscribers. Cluts (U.S. Pat. No. 5,616,876) asks user to select songs from a collection to form a preferred song list. The computer server then analyzes this list to suggest more songs similar to user preference. There is no method to suggest how two or multiple users can match their mutual preference to music.